One of my earliest memories is of Showbiz Pizza (when the name was changed a few years later after the merger, we continued to call it Showbiz because none of us knew it was the knock-off) and I had a Billy Bob doll (one of the ones here I’m assuming from the 1984-1990 era unless mine actually came from an older cousin or my sister who is 8 years older than me https://www.showbizpizza.com/sppcollect/dolls/dolls_billy.ht...) that I kept in my room alongside some tokens that I stored in my jewelry box (because if you are two years old, you keep your tokens in a jewelry box).
I was born after the “collapse” of the Chuck E. Cheese business and the late 70s/early 80s home video game era as a whole (but just in time for the NES to take over the world and reignite the industry), so I don’t have the same memories of these as places to play video games (I don’t think I ever really interacted with an arcade cabinet until Mortal Kombat in 1992 or 1993, and even that was almost certainly after the home versions were out out) because we had a Nintendo and that was video games to me, but I remember it for skee-ball and the animatronic shows. I loved the shows. Watching the history of this stuff and the stuff on Showbiz on Last Week Tonight and other channels is wild to me that this was something that actually existed in our world in the last 35 years.
After our Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese closed (another one still existed but it was further away), the big thing was “Discovery Zone” - which tried to do the same thing except it had lots of indoor playground equipment. But I always just strapped into the shooting or basketball games that would reward those with good hand-eye coordination with tickets and stuff. And I went to my first Dave & Busters in third grade and then I discovered what a Chuck E. Cheese for adults looked like and that my friends, THAT was the dream for many many years.
I was born after the “collapse” of the Chuck E. Cheese business and the late 70s/early 80s home video game era as a whole (but just in time for the NES to take over the world and reignite the industry), so I don’t have the same memories of these as places to play video games (I don’t think I ever really interacted with an arcade cabinet until Mortal Kombat in 1992 or 1993, and even that was almost certainly after the home versions were out out) because we had a Nintendo and that was video games to me, but I remember it for skee-ball and the animatronic shows. I loved the shows. Watching the history of this stuff and the stuff on Showbiz on Last Week Tonight and other channels is wild to me that this was something that actually existed in our world in the last 35 years.
After our Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese closed (another one still existed but it was further away), the big thing was “Discovery Zone” - which tried to do the same thing except it had lots of indoor playground equipment. But I always just strapped into the shooting or basketball games that would reward those with good hand-eye coordination with tickets and stuff. And I went to my first Dave & Busters in third grade and then I discovered what a Chuck E. Cheese for adults looked like and that my friends, THAT was the dream for many many years.